Yogic Flying And Unified Fields -- Major Weirdness Hits Capital

WASHINGTON — This is how the world works. You have four fundamental forces of nature: electromagnetism, weak interaction, strong interaction and gravitation.

The first two join together to form electro-weak unification. Electro- weak unification joins with strong interaction to form grand interaction. Then grand interaction joins with gravitation, and you have superunification -- a unified field, in short.

And what can you do with a unified field? Well, for one thing, you can do yogic flying, the first stage of which is hopping; and if you get 22 athletically fit young men hopping -- and a convention hall big enough to hold them and the media, which on slow days are sure to turn out for oddball events -- you can stage the first North American Yogic Flying Olympics and get some handsome press coverage.

But more about the Olympics later because hopping is nothing. Once the transcendental meditators have perfected their meditating -- none have yet -- they'll be able to move on to levitating, the second stage of yogic flying; and once they perfect that, they can go on to the third stage, actual flying. Fold yourself up in the lotus position, unify the field and take off for the coast, no clearance from the tower needed.

But even flying will be only the outward and visible manifestation of the deeper meaning of the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field -- a mere symbol of its greater power.

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, one-time counselor to the Beatles and guru to transcendental meditators worldwide, has figured this out: If the square root of 1 percent of the world's population -- about 7,000 people -- created a permanent unified field, the world would know such harmony that the rivalry between the superpowers would disappear and we would enter a new epoch of global peace.

Naturally, there are numbers to prove this. In the West, at least, the Maharishi's followers love to put numbers and charts to everything. Example:

During the 1983-84 Taste of Utopia Assembly at Maharishi International U. in Iowa -- it used to be Parsons College, and was strange even then -- 7,000 transcendental meditators created a unified field and achieved: (a) increased progress toward peace in Lebanon and increased patent applications in the United States, (b) decreased traffic fatalities and infectious diseases notifications worldwide and (c) ''a significant impact . . . on stock prices, explicitly allowing for the impact of long-term interest rates,'' according to David Orme-Johnson, Ph.D., of MIU's department of psychology.

Okay, this is weirdness on a grand scale, I admit. Indeed, the nation's capital -- no stranger to the bizarre -- may never have witnessed anything weirder than the North American Yogic Flying Olympics. Imagine 22 people in lotus positions hopping over hurdles and down a 50-meter foam-rubber race track, while cameras whir away, 1,000 beatifically smiling onlookers crowd the stands and the head of the All-India Ayurveda Congress, with retinue, beams on from a throne chair opposite the stands.

But, finally, is it any more weird to pursue world peace through the immutable laws of the unified field, whatever that is, than it is to pursue world peace through the Strategic Defense Initiative, whatever that is?

On a scale of one to 10, rate the strangeness of yogic hoppers against the strangeness of President Reagan's nomination of Daniel Manion for the bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals or against the White House's ''constructive engagement'' policy towards South Africa. At least you can see yogic hoppers hop. Has anyone seen constructive engagement engage?

It's no easy chore uniting the four fundamental forces of nature, but who's to say that those transcendental meditators won't be flying before NASA does again?